Development agencies have been trying to introduce ‘clean’ stoves since the 1950s, with varying levels of success. The initial impetus was to address deforestation41 rather than to ease women’s unpaid labour or to address the health implications of traditional stove fumes. When it transpired that the environmental disaster was in fact driven by clearing land for agriculture rather than by women’s collection of fuel, most of the development industry simply dropped their clean-stove distribution initiatives. Emma Crewe, an anthropologist at SOAS University of London, explains that clean stove initiatives were ‘deemed to be a failure as a solution to the energy crisis, and not relevant to any other development area’.42
But clean stoves are back on the agenda, and in September 2010 Hillary Clinton announced the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which calls for 100 million additional homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.43 This is a laudable aim, but if it is to be implemented, and if women are actually to use the stoves, a lot of work still remains to be done, not least on data collection.
A 2014 UN publication notes that, relative to data on water and sanitation, country data on access to efficient cookstoves is ‘sparse’, with national energy policies and poverty reduction strategy papers tending to focus on electrification instead.44 According to a 2005 World Bank report when it comes to collecting data on people’s access to energy governments also tend to measure things like the number of new grid connections, rather than the socio-economic impact of development projects.45 They also don’t generally collect data on what user needs actually are (for example, drinking-water pumping; food processing; fuel collection) before starting on their development projects. And the result of this dearth of data is that, to date, clean cook stoves have nearly all been rejected by users.
In the 1990s Emma Crewe was informed by stove technicians that low adoption was because users came from a ‘conservative culture’.46 They needed ‘educating’ in proper stove usage. Women are still being blamed in the twenty-first century. A 2013 WASHplus-and USAID-funded report on user experiences of five stoves in Bangladesh repeatedly acknowledged that all five stoves increased cooking time and required more attending.47 This prevented women from multitasking as they would with a traditional stove, and forced them to change the way they cooked – again increasing their workload. Nevertheless, the main and repeated recommendation of the report was to fix the women, rather than the stoves. The women needed to be educated on how great the ‘improved’ stoves were, rather than stove designers needing to be educated on how not to increase women’s already fifteen-hour average working day.48
Despite what academics, NGOs and expatriate technicians seem to think, the problem is not the women. It is the stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them, explains Crewe.49 And although the low adoption rate is a problem going back decades, development agencies have yet to crack the problem,50 for the very simple reason that they still haven’t got the hang of consulting women and then designing a product rather than enforcing a centralised design on them from above.51
One Indian programme failed because while the new stove worked well in the lab, it required more maintenance than traditional stoves – maintenance the designers had simply assumed the ‘household’ would take care of.52 But structural repairs in Orissa are traditionally the responsibility of men, who didn’t see fixing the new stoves as a priority, because their wives could still prepare meals using the traditional stoves. So the women went back to using the toxic fume-producing traditional stoves, while the new stoves gathered dust in corners.
The issue of gendered priorities also affects household spending and therefore, if a household will adopt a stove at all. Despite hundreds of attempts to introduce a variety of clean stoves in Bangladesh since the early 1980s, over 98% of the rural population continue to cook with traditional biomass-burning stoves.53 A 2010 study which set out to understand why, found that women ‘seemed to exhibit a stronger preference than men for any improved stove, in particular for the health-saving chimney stoves’, and were more likely to order stoves when asked without their husbands present. But when the team returned to deliver the stoves four months later, the gender gap had disappeared; women’s preferences had fallen back into line with their husbands’.
That women’s failure to adopt clean stoves may simply result from a lack of purchasing authority is backed up by a 2016 report which found that ‘female-headed households are more likely to adopt cleaner cooking solutions than male-headed households’.54 Meanwhile a 2012 Yale study found that 94% of respondents ‘believed that indoor smoke from the traditional stoves is harmful’, but ‘opted for traditional cookstove technology so they could afford basic needs’ – although this didn’t prevent the university from headlining a press release on the study ‘Despite efforts for change, Bangladeshi women prefer to use pollution-causing cookstoves,’ as if the women were perverse rather than lacking in purchasing authority.55 Perhaps silly women obstreperously choosing air pollution for no good reason made for a better headline than endemic poverty.
This decades-long failure to design either stoves or implementation plans that account for women’s needs is a health disaster that is set to get worse. As climate change makes high-quality fuel increasingly scarce (because of soil erosion and desertification), women are forced to use leaves, straw and dung, which give off fumes that are even more toxic. And this is a travesty because there is no doubt that clean stoves would significantly improve women’s lives. A 2011 Yemen study found that women who lacked access to water and gas stoves spent 24% of their time engaged in paid work; this rose to around 52% for women who did have access.56 A 2016 report into stove use in India found that when women did adopt clean stoves (for example the cheap and portable Anagi 2 which has been found to substantially decrease cooking time), they had more time for social and family activities and community meetings.57 Households with clean stoves also reported sending their children to school more often.58
There is some cause for hope. In November 2015, researchers in India reported59 that they had conducted a successful field study using ‘an inexpensive (USD $1) device that may be simply placed in existing three-stone hearths’. This simple device cut wood use and smoke ‘to levels comparable to those achieved by the more expensive high-efficiency cookstoves’. This breakthrough came about as a result of filling a decades-long data gap: noting that the two decades of government attempts to implement high-efficiency cookstoves (HECs) in rural India had been largely unsuccessful, the researchers decided to investigate why.
And by speaking to women, they found out: HECs were unable to accept ‘large pieces of wood without having them split lengthwise’, an issue also uncovered in the 2013 study of five clean stoves mentioned earlier. These researchers understood that everything to do with cooking, including fuel, was the domain of women, and that since splitting wood was ‘very difficult for the women to do’, it was perfectly rational for women to ‘abandon these HECs since their traditional chulha (mud and brick stoves) have no such size limitation’.
Based on their findings they set about fixing the stove technology to fit the women. Realising that ‘a single HEC stove cannot possibly replace all of these traditional stoves’, the researchers concluded that ‘significant fuelwood reductions can only be achieved with locally customizable solutions in different parts of the world’. The result of their data-led design was the mewar angithi (MA), a simple metal device that ‘was engineered to be placed in a traditional chulha in order to provide the same airflow mechanism in the traditional chulha as occurs in the HEC stoves’.
To keep costs down (another regular concern of stove users), they constructed the device from metal washer industry scrap metal that they found in a local market ‘at one-fourth the cost of solid metal sheets’. And because of the ‘simple, bent plate design of the MA, it is easily customized to in
dividual chulha units’. Since then, studies in Kenya60 and Ghana61 with the same device have found similarly positive results, showing what can be achieved when designers start from the basis of closing the gender data gap.
CHAPTER 8
One-Size-Fits-Men
In 1998, a pianist called Christopher Donison wrote that ‘one can divide the world into roughly two constituencies’: those with larger hands, and those with smaller hands. Donison was writing as a male pianist who, due to his smaller than average hands, had struggled for years with traditional keyboards, but he could equally have been writing as a woman. There is plenty of data showing that women have, on average, smaller hands than men,1 and yet we continue to design equipment around the average male hand as if one-size-fits-men is the same as one-size-fits-all.
This one-size-fits-men approach to supposedly gender-neutral products is disadvantaging women. The average female handspan is between seven and eight inches,2 which makes the standard forty-eight-inch keyboard something of a challenge. Octaves on a standard keyboard are 7.4 inches wide, and one study found that this keyboard disadvantages 87% of adult female pianists.3 Meanwhile, a 2015 study which compared the handspan of 473 adult pianists to their ‘level of acclaim’ found that all twelve of the pianists considered to be of international renown had spans of 8.8 inches or above.4 Of the two women who made it into this exalted group, one had a handspan of nine inches and the other had a handspan of 9.5 inches.
The standard piano keyboard doesn’t just make it harder for female pianists to match the level of acclaim reached by their male colleagues: it also affects their health. A range of studies carried out on instrumentalists during the 1980s and 90s found that female musicians suffered ‘disproportionately’ from work-related injuries, and that keyboard players were among those ‘most at risk’. Several studies have found that female pianists run an approximately 50% higher risk of pain and injury than male pianists; in one study 78% of women compared to 47% of men had developed RSI.5
It seems likely that this is related to hand size: another study from 1984, which included only male pianists, identified twenty-six ‘successful performers’ defined as ‘well-known soloists and winners of international competitions’, and ten ‘problem cases’: those who had ‘struggled with technical or injury problems over a long period’.6 The former group’s average handspan was 9.2 inches compared to the problem cases’ 8.7 inches – which is nevertheless still substantially larger than the average female handspan.
It was while Christopher Donison was practising the coda of the G minor Chopin Ballade on his Steinway concert grand ‘for about the thousandth time’, that he had the thought that led to his designing a new keyboard for people with smaller hands. What if it wasn’t that his hands were too small, but that the standard keyboard was too large? The result of this thought was the 7/8 DS keyboard, which, Donison claimed, transformed his playing. ‘I could finally use the correct fingerings. Broken-chord formations could be played on one hand position, instead of two. [. . .] Wide, sweeping, left-hand arpeggiated figures so prevalent in Romantic music become possible, and I could actually get on with the business of cultivating the right sound, rather than repeatedly practicing the same passage.’7 Donison’s experience is backed up by numerous studies which have also found that a 7/8 keyboard dispels the professional and health disadvantages imposed by the conventional keyboard.8 And yet there remains a strange (that is, if you don’t accept that sexism is at play here) reluctance in the piano world to adapt.
The reluctance to abandon design that suits only the largest male hands seems endemic. I remember a time back in the early 2000s when it was the smallest handsets that were winning phonemeasuring contests. That all changed with the advent of the iPhone and its pretenders. Suddenly it was all about the size of your screen, and bigger was definitely better. The average smartphone is now 5.5 inches,9 and while we’re admittedly all extremely impressed by the size of your screen, it’s a slightly different matter when it comes to fitting into half the population’s hands (not to mention minuscule or non-existent pockets). The average man can fairly comfortably use his device one-handed – but the average woman’s hand is not much bigger than the handset itself.
This is obviously annoying – and foolish for a company like Apple, given that research shows women are more likely to own an iPhone than men.10 But don’t expect to uncover a method to their madness any time soon, because it’s extraordinarily difficult to get any smartphone company to comment on their massive-screen fixation. In desperation for answers I turned to the Guardian’s tech reporter Alex Hern. But he couldn’t help me either. ‘It’s a noted issue,’ he confirmed, but ‘one I’ve never got a straight answer on.’ Speaking to people informally, he said, the ‘standard response’ was that phones were no longer designed for one-handed use. He’s also been told that actually many women opt for larger phones, a trend that was ‘usually attributed to handbags’. And look, handbags are all well and good, but one of the reasons women carry them in the first place is because our clothes lack adequate pockets. So designing phones to be handbag-friendly rather than pocket-friendly feels like adding injury (more on this later) to insult. In any case, it’s rather odd to claim that phones are designed for women to carry in their handbags when so many passive-tracking apps clearly assume your phone will be either in your hands or in your pockets at all times, rather than sitting in your handbag on your office desk.
I next turned to award-winning tech journalist and author James Ball, who has another theory for why the big-screen fixation persists: because the received wisdom is that men drive high-end smartphone purchases, women in fact don’t figure in the equation at all. If this is true it’s certainly an odd approach for Apple to take given the research about women being more likely to own iPhones. But I have another, more fundamental complaint with this analysis, because it again suggests that the problem is with women, rather than male-biased design. In other words: if women aren’t driving high-end smartphone purchases is it because women aren’t interested in smartphones, or could it be because smartphones are designed without women in mind? On the bright side, however, Ball reassured me that screens probably wouldn’t be getting any bigger because ‘they’ve hit the limit of men’s hand size’.
Good news for men, then. But tough breaks for women like my friend Liz who owns a third-generation Motorola Moto G. In response to one of my regular rants about handset sizes she replied that she’d just been ‘complaining to a friend about how difficult it was to zoom on my phone camera. He said it was easy on his. Turns out we have the same phone. I wondered if it was a hand-size thing’.
Almost certainly, it was. When Zeynep Tufekci, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, was trying to document tear-gas use in the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, the size of her Google Nexus got in the way.11 It was the evening of 9 June. Gezi Park was crowded. Parents were there with their children. And then the canisters were fired. Because officials ‘often claimed that tear gas was used only on vandals and violent protesters’, Tufekci wanted to document what was happening. So she pulled out her phone. ‘And as my lungs, eyes and nose burned with the pain of the lachrymatory agent released from multiple capsules that had fallen around me, I started cursing.’ Her phone was too big. She could not take a picture one-handed – ‘something I had seen countless men with larger hands do all the time’. All Tufekci’s photos from the event were unusable, she wrote, and ‘for one simple reason: good smartphones are designed for male hands’.
Like the standard keyboard, smartphones designed for male hands also may be affecting women’s health. It is a relatively new field of study, but the research that does exist on the health impact of smartphones is not positive.12 But although women’s hand size is demonstrably smaller than men’s, and although women have been found to have a higher prevalence of musculoskeletal symptoms and disorders,13 research into the impact of large smartphones on hands and arms does not buck the gender data gap trend. In the s
tudies I found, women were significantly under-represented as subjects,14 and the vast majority of studies did not sex-disaggregate their data15 – including those that did manage to adequately represent women.16 This is unfortunate because the few that did sex-disaggregate their data reported a statistically significant gender difference in the impact of phone size on women’s hand and arm health.17
The answer to the problem of smartphones that are too big for women’s hands seems obvious: design smaller handsets. And there are of course some smaller handsets on the market, notably Apple’s iPhone SE. But the SE wasn’t updated for two years and so was an inferior product to the standard iPhone range (which offers only huge or huger as size options). And it’s now been discontinued anyway. In China, women and men with smaller hands can buy the Keecoo K1 which, with its hexagonal design, is trying to account for women’s hand size: good.18 But it has less processing power and comes with in-built air-brushing: bad. Very bad.
Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men Page 16